Monday, July 5, 2010

Good Game Cube Era RPG's

Hi everyone, as promised I've come up with a nice list of my favorite RPG's from the game cube era.

Skies of Arcadia: This was a Dreamcast game and it shows in the graphics but what you can't tell is that the storyline is super original and funny and the world is one of the most unique ones you'll ever play in. You fly a pirate ship around in space helping the blue pirates (good) and helpless countries against the black pirates and the conniving Empire, and end up doing lots of crazy things like going to center of the earth and the moon. Particularly unique to this game are the ship battles, which play out like a tense, "sudden death is possible but you can usually recover and overcome", card game. I won't spoil it further.. just buy this if you ever see it on amazon.com. (not a sponsored link)

FF9: I usually avoid posting about Squaresoft rpg's on general principle but I do believe I should open with Final Fantasy 9 simply because I love the storyline and it is so creative and fun. I loved the music too. I played this one when I was in college, my junior year. The story starts out with a play which becomes an abduction, then a flight from the evil royalty with their good princess daughter, all across the continent and then into another dimension of course. The plot variety in the game is tip top as the war is not always one-sided. Sometimes the good guys win and sometimes the bad.

Paper Mario - The Thousand Year Door: The writing in this game is priceless. Dry witty humor worth hours of entertainment. The storyline is top-rate, the puzzles are hard and clever. But the game isn't impossible, and never devolves into ridiculous cheesiness unlike its sequel on the Wii.... There's even and old cave type experience alla Lufia 2, a never ending pit of dispair you can delve through and leave every 5 levels.

Phantasy Star Online: The only "online" game to come out for game cube, it supports 4 player at the same time on one console as well, and more levels than we ever got through alive. The game cube version has a new adventure with invisible cloaking and uncloaking enemies, lush environs, crazy hard bosses, etc.. I like episode one more personally but at any rate this one is a fun long game to play with friends.

Zelda Twilight Princess + Zelda Wind Waker: Twilight Princess is a fantastic achievement on low powered hardware. The graphics, sounds, puzzles, story, all top rate and very dark, detailed and you get to fight the scariest looking Ganon you've ever faced, he can even possess people.
The monsters posses a much better "Artificial stupidity" than usual also, so you might find the random mobs to be more of a problem than usual.

Zelda Wind Waker is on the other hand cutesy but deceivingly so because it requires thought for its puzzles, and has great heart in its story. It takes place after all the other Zelda's to follow in our time-line and it is where Ganon finally dies after losing his connection to the Triforce, never to return. You also get to know the original King of Hyrule a lot better ;)

Some dragon game on the PS2 that Anton showed me. (He'll give me the name shortly I'm sure)

Anton says: Dragon Game on the PS2...Could it be Dragon Quest 8? That is probably the best RPG I played on PS2. Or if you're thinking of Radiata Stories, I might have shown you that one, and it has a few dragons. That game was disjointed and the humor wasn't funny, but the art style was breathtaking and time-passage in the city meant things were always happening, which made that part of the game the highlight for me!

Don't forget Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, and Beyond Good and Evil, as the highest quality experiences I ever had on ps2. FFXII would have blown me away had I played it sooner, also, but now my interests and expectations have shifted drastically...ever since I started playing games online, that's all I care for any more!

Baiten Kaitos A unique card game played RPG with very cleverly done battle mechanics and gorgeous hand drawn graphics. The plot however is a bit.. weird. Still a fun game to play nonetheless. Some of the puzzles are OK too, but I don't like how at the very very end the difficulty goes through the roof forcing you to grind levels up before finishing it like so many Japan RPGS do.

6 comments:

Dragon Game on the PS2...Could it be Dragon Quest 8? That is probably the best RPG I played on PS2. Or if you're thinking of Radiata Stories, I might have shown you that one, and it has a few dragons. That game was disjointed and the humor wasn't funny, but the art style was breathtaking and time-passage in the city meant things were always happening, which made that part of the game the highlight for me!

Don't forget Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, and Beyond Good and Evil, as the highest quality experiences I ever had on ps2. FFXII would have blown me away had I played it sooner, also, but now my interests and expectations have shifted drastically...ever since I started playing games online, that's all I care for any more!

I think I've seen Skies of Arcadia in the bargain section at my local Gamestop for some horribly low price, looked at it, thought about it, rear reviews online, and never bought it.

You're saying it's actually a good game? Hmm, maybe it's worth checking out next time I see it. Especially if it's only $5 or so.

The boy did pick up Super Mario Galaxy 2 the other day though so we're working through that at the moment, which is funny because we never beat the first one.

We also got the new Super Mario Bros. for the Wii which is just freaking INSANE!!! (And that's both good, and bad.) Catchy as all hell background music, but some levels are just hair-tearingly frustrating, especially when I play with my 5 y/old daughter at her urging and we have to stop playing, because she insists on trying to beat levels we've not beaten yet and the multiplayer game seems designed around inhibiting each other more than helping each other.

I also haven't beaten Sky Crawlers yet, or Muramasa, for that matter. So it's probably not a good idea to throw yet another game into the mix ;)

I did World 1 in two stints (Aside: I find it amusing that they're sticking with the Mario vernacular and referring to each 'Chapter' as a 'World', with each 'World' containing multiple Galaxies.)

I completed World 2 in just one approx. 1.5-hour long session, although I didn't complete it 100%; there were two levels I never visited (I found a shortcut that bypassed them), while I also didn't bother getting every Star in each of the Galaxies that I did pass through.

There was one level that was a little frustrating, requiring you to navigate a floating platform while dodging circular saw blades that were cutting out chunks of the floor. In some cases the saws even cut away entire sections of the floor, so you not only had to dodge obstacles while moving forward, but you had to do so as fast as possible before the floor fell into the abyss. But as there was also a 1-Up part way through it was really just a matter of try, try, try again, as the 1-Up negated a lot of the death-created frustration.

I think the difference between Galaxy 1 and 2 is more in how I'm playing 2: casually. Pick up, play, put down compared to how I played 1. Woohoo! New Mario game! Must beat it as fast as possible!

That said, I do recall one or two levels in G1 that I thought were just insane, and they were only a little way into the game.

Yoshi's Island DS failed to impress me in this manner, too. A lot of the fun in beating the 'Mario' games, especially Yoshi's Island, is collecting everything in each level: All 3 Yoshi coins; all 20 red coins; & the 5 Flowers. And doing so while keeping your Health/Star points at 30 for 100% completion. Yet obtaining 100% on even some of the World 1 Yoshi's Island DS levels - what one would consider the easiest levels in the game - proved nigh on impossible (at least to me).

I did World 1 in two stints (Aside: I find it amusing that they're sticking with the Mario vernacular and referring to each 'Chapter' as a 'World', with each 'World' containing multiple Galaxies.)

I completed World 2 in just one approx. 1.5-hour long session, although I didn't complete it 100%; there were two levels I never visited (I found a shortcut that bypassed them), while I also didn't bother getting every Star in each of the Galaxies that I did pass through.

There was one level that was a little frustrating, requiring you to navigate a floating platform while dodging circular saw blades that were cutting out chunks of the floor. In some cases the saws even cut away entire sections of the floor, so you not only had to dodge obstacles while moving forward, but you had to do so as fast as possible before the floor fell into the abyss. But as there was also a 1-Up part way through it was really just a matter of try, try, try again, as the 1-Up negated a lot of the death-created frustration.

I think the difference between Galaxy 1 and 2 is more in how I'm playing 2: casually. Pick up, play, put down compared to how I played 1. Woohoo! New Mario game! Must beat it as fast as possible!

That said, I do recall one or two levels in G1 that I thought were just insane, and they were only a little way into the game.

Yoshi's Island DS failed to impress me in this manner, too. A lot of the fun in beating the 'Mario' games, especially Yoshi's Island, is collecting everything in each level: All 3 Yoshi coins; all 20 red coins; & the 5 Flowers. And doing so while keeping your Health/Star points at 30 for 100% completion. Yet obtaining 100% on even some of the World 1 Yoshi's Island DS levels - what one would consider the easiest levels in the game - proved nigh on impossible (at least to me).